Time for my weekly update.

Well, the work as a research assistant is progressing.
Can't really say much else besides that I guess.

At this stage, I'm still unemployed as my approval documents have dissapeared off the map, and I am not getting paid for the work I am doing, which isn't a great amount anyway.

Because I am not a employee or a student of the Chemical Engineering faculty, I can not attend safety induction sessions, and because I have not passed safety induction, I can not do experiments.

What does that leave me with?
Literature reviews........
~sigh~
I've written about 13 pages of lit review in double space format, and it's about as much as I can somehow muster. In which, I'm sure that I will definitely have to do a lot more in the future. My friend Sherryn said it took her 13 months to do her literature review, so me writing 13 pages in 2 weeks isn't bad at all....

Linda Ozman, a previous student with a similar project but with Skim Milk products had a literature review of 48 double spaced pages.... so I've still got a way to go as Tim (my supervisor) said hers was a good example to follow with.

Project wise, we also had a meeting with Tim Lang, our industry sponsor, technical director of Food Ingredients Technologies Australia (FITA.... funny, as Archery organisation is also called FITA..) He was rather happy with the progress so far and very interested in seeing what our future plans were in regards to what we would be looking at etc.
He's also planning to give us some contract work regarding coffee beans and water extraction processes. Should be interesting to say the least.

On Friday, I also learnt how to use a Viscometer. It's a device to measure viscocity in fluids (liquid fluids in this case as the device is not capable of measuring gas fluids).
The principle is rather easy. You have a cylindrical chamber of diameter X. Inside the chamber sits your fluid. A cylindrical block of diameter Y (smaller than X) is inserted, so the fluid is a buffer between the chamber wall and block wall.
Start the block spinning.
As the block spins, it moves the fluid around it as well (translational forces passing to the molecules of the fluid).
You slowly increase the speed of the block spin, until the fluid spin rate doesn't change, and that is the viscocity of the fluid in a transformed set of units. The device measures the changes of fluid spin with resistance of the block spin as a ratio of torque upon the block.
A nifty device that I will have to use at some point.

Archery has been going good. My form is improving greatly of late, and my shooting has picked up. I'm still waiting for my pair of limbs I bought off Ebay to get here, but once they get here, I'm hoping it will solve some of my tuning problems, so my shooting will also get a little better with that fixed.

I'm still pissed about the election.
I just hope that Kerry wins the US election instead of Bush......
At least that would be a decent election result I think.

As for other things, it's very sad that Christopher Reeve died....
Long live Superman.